Comments on: Great colleagueshttps://www.mattcutts.com/blog/great-colleagues/
Sun, 02 Aug 2015 14:01:52 +0000hourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3By: Chris_Dhttps://www.mattcutts.com/blog/great-colleagues/#comment-20189
Wed, 15 Mar 2006 00:02:11 +0000http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=118#comment-20189SER2006 was yesterday in Sydney. Brian did a great job, speaking at both the breakfast session, and again presenting at the main conference around midday. And he hung around at the conference until early evening, and answered a lot of questions and took a lot of feedback. I saw him making lots of notes in his little black book.

Its a long way to come to Australia for a 3 day round trip – so kudos to Brian for putting in such a long day after a long flight.

]]>By: Janethttps://www.mattcutts.com/blog/great-colleagues/#comment-20188
Wed, 22 Feb 2006 16:11:03 +0000http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=118#comment-20188I look forward to attending the panels you’ll be on at SES in NY.
One thing I’d love to see address in some session is how sites that have good placement in Google can safely go about making major changes in design and structure of their sites.

Two scenarios come to mind. One is a situation like that described in an earlier post, where domains need to change because of changes in the business, or in how the business wants to feature products.

The other scenario is just when a site grows and the original structure no longer makes sense either from a site management or a visitor perspective. The site may be too big for visitors to easily find what they want, and it therefore makes sense to spin off smaller, more targetted niche sites. (Say, you started with MyPets.com and after a few years, you had thousands of pages about cats, dogs, gerbils, etc. So you want to spin off a Mycats.com, MyPets.com, etc. How could you do that effectively?

]]>By: Slavhttps://www.mattcutts.com/blog/great-colleagues/#comment-20187
Wed, 22 Feb 2006 13:46:38 +0000http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=118#comment-20187Any plans to send the infamous Google Guy to a conference … or has he retired?!?

I am considering paying the money to come to the conference just so I can ask you when the next PR update will be. I know Big Daddy is slowing it down, but I would love to know a ballpark time frame so I don’t drive myself crazy checking every day. What should I do, Matt?

For example, right now, due to Google’s current implementation of Smart Pricing, people are starting to advocate removing Google ads from under-performing / non-targeted pages because they reduce the amount the webmaster gets per click. I can understand that you want to pay more for relevant targeted clicks and less on general interest clicks, but you need to be careful how you implement it. Right now it seems to be on a site-by-site or account-by-account basis instead of a page-by-page basis. That means a smart webmaster will remove Google Ads from non-targeted / under-performing pages and replace them with, well, some competitor of yours that doesn’t have Smart Pricing. If you made your Smart Pricing on a page-by-page basis similar to PageRank, this would not be an issue since targeted pages would be paid the higher targeted content amount and non-targeted pages would get paid the lower general click amount. Of course, even then, smart webmasters would be wise to replace Google Ads on under-performing pages with something without Smart Pricing that pays more, but at least, even if they don’t remove the under-performing ads, they won’t get penalized for a couple pages that bring down the Smart Pricing average for the whole website.

After finding out this information, I am now going to have to go through some of my high traffic websites and see what ads I should remove. There are certain pages that, by their nature, don’t get many click thrus or are not targeted in nature, or for some reason are not performing well. Since all Google Ads are inserted into many of my websites via include files, I will now have to figure out a way to show Google ads on some pages but not others, which is a big pain. Plus then I also lose the benefit of Google Ads reporting to me the number of page views for the entire website and each section (by using the channels feature). That allows me to see what’s hot and what’s not, and develop content and articles and posts related to what people are actually interested in.

Also, ironically, a website with good content and a lot of it will have a LOWER click-thru rate than a junk website where the only place to go is to click on the ads. If you are not careful, you are actually penalizing content sites where people stick around and read a lot of pages and rewarding websites that encourage people to go away by clicking on an ad.

It’s things like these that Google needs to be careful of and needs to talk with webmasters about. Many of your policies often have unintended consequences on legit webmasters even though those policies are targeted at spammers. So more feedback and dialog between legit webmasters and the Google Engineering team would be great.

I agree with Alex that there is really no need to push the whole “bus test” much further. This has dangerous inklings of a subject/thread that gets pushed around for a long time…

As for improving webmaster communication… I haven’t seen that Google is throwing a party for SES NY. Considering the quality of parties that you guys throw, when armed with a city like NYC, why would you back off? Any chance that you can rally those party-throwing-AdWords-folks to make something happen??

]]>By: Will Mahoneyhttps://www.mattcutts.com/blog/great-colleagues/#comment-20184
Mon, 20 Feb 2006 15:12:33 +0000http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=118#comment-20184Matt,
It’s really great that in this forum, people can ask questions to you and get actual answers. It’s a really great lead and, as I’m new to SEO, a great learning experience.

Keep up the good work.

Will

]]>By: Roy Dalehttps://www.mattcutts.com/blog/great-colleagues/#comment-20183
Mon, 20 Feb 2006 06:18:19 +0000http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=118#comment-20183Speaking of better “webmaster/engineering communications”…
The most frustrating thing about communicating with Google is that after taking up the invitation to help clean up the index by reporting an obvious cheat website in detail via google.co.uk/contact/spamreport.html or google.com/contact/spamreport.html (where it says “We thoroughly investigate every report of deceptive practices and take appropriate action when we uncover genuine abuse”) there is no way of knowing what the reaction will be or if anyone is going to take any action at all. It’s even more frustrating when the reported website is still appearing in the top ten results when you repeat the same search weeks later. If a website makes changes in the meantime (removes the hidden text, or whatever it is that’s fooling the index) that would be understandable. And maybe sometimes Google disagrees with reports. But when it’s beyond any doubt that a site has been designed to fool the index (e.g. by adding a bunch of keywords in ‘invisible’ text) and it’s still in the same position weeks after being reported, it gives the impression that the report has been ignored. Are there simply too many reports to handle? Do most of them have to be passed over?
]]>By: Alex Hendersonhttps://www.mattcutts.com/blog/great-colleagues/#comment-20182
Mon, 20 Feb 2006 05:04:12 +0000http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=118#comment-20182First off Matt, please don’t take the bus test any time soon, okay?

When it comes to communication, I think my personal biggest gripe is that the method for reporting blatant / obvious spam issues is the same as reporting any other “don’t like the results” issue, and often leads to a slow response or worse. If there was a more direct and effective way (potentially with some feedback) to handle the most obvious blatant spam (like third level .info domains packed full of unlilnked URLs and repeated words & massive cross links), I am sure that we all could help to keep the worst spammers from infesting Google.

It is a common complaint I see in most webmaster forums I visit.

On the plus side, blogs like this and other less than official communications are certainly helping to keep the webmaster community feeling a little more part of the game, and that too is a good thing.

Thanks for having this blog and keeping us up to date, and let’s hope 2006 and beyond come good for all of us.

]]>By: Seanhttps://www.mattcutts.com/blog/great-colleagues/#comment-20181
Mon, 20 Feb 2006 04:45:06 +0000http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=118#comment-20181Thanks for the hot tip about Brian ‘speaking in Australia.” I didn’t even know a conference in Oz was on the cards. Needless to say I’m locked in and looking forward to it!
]]>By: Randerhttps://www.mattcutts.com/blog/great-colleagues/#comment-20180
Mon, 20 Feb 2006 00:38:13 +0000http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/?p=118#comment-20180> we’ll keep looking for ways that we could scale up communication from the engineering side of Google.

It would really be great if webmasters could have a hint as to why their sites have dropped out of the serps months ago, for no apparent reason. A lot better than tearing our hair out daily.

How about letting us know what it is that Google doesn’t like about our sites, and what we can do to get back in the serps again.